Month: April 2013

By LYNN PICKNETT & CLIVE PRINCE

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It is remarkable what happens when you abandon your preconceptions about Christianity – hard though that might be, if, like us, you were brought up as a churchgoer – and approach the subject as objectively as possible.

When we began our latest book, The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Man Believed to be God, we thought we had already reached certain conclusions in our 1997 The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (which Dan Brown acknowledges as a major inspiration for The Da Vinci Code). But as our research progressed we became enthralled – perhaps even a little shocked – by what we were faced with, but which only served to reinforce and clarify our previous conclusions.

We begin with a great mystery.

The Great Debate

Of the many puzzles surrounding Jesus, perhaps the most fundamental is the clash between the Jewish and pagan elements in his mission.

Certain New Testament passages are unequivocally hardcore Jewish nationalist, such as Jesus’ claim to the title of Messiah, a role which (despite Christians’ later redefinition) only makes sense in Jewish terms. The Messiah – ‘Anointed’, in Greek ‘Christos’ – was to be the great deliverer, who would reassemble and lead the twelve tribes of Israel in kicking out the Romans, before finally fulfilling God’s promise to extend their rule to all other nations.

Of course, Jesus conspicuously failed to fulfil that role. From the Jews’ perspective he achieved the exact opposite, spawning a religion that, in his name, subjected them to centuries of subjugation. That is why his besotted early followers changed the whole emphasis of ‘Messiah’, with Paul initiating the new spin with the notion that has underpinned Christianity ever since: instead of being a hard-nosed Jewish military leader, the new Messiah was a god-man whose redeeming death and resurrection offered eternal life to all who accepted him, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

Yet the gospel writers still ensured Jesus was associated with the old prophecies of the Messiah, such as entering Jerusalem on a donkey, which was an unequivocal declaration of Messiahship.

Even though by the time of the gospels the Christian movement had adopted Paul’s doctrine that the message was for all mankind, clearly the internal evidence shows that Jesus himself intended to confine the ‘Good News’ to the people of Israel. We see this in the tale of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, where at first he refuses to heal her possessed daughter because she is not one of the chosen people – even calling her ‘dog’, the racist term used by Jews of Gentiles – only changing his mind when she implicitly acknowledges his God’s superiority. As several scholars admit, since this contradicts the gospel writer’s own position, it must be authentic.

Jesus the Pagan

On the other hand, some Biblical passages are hard to equate with Judaism, especially those about Jesus’ more private rituals, most obviously the Eucharist, the symbolic eating of his ‘body’ as bread and drinking of his ‘blood’ as wine that he supposedly established at the Last Supper. Such a rite, even symbolically, was unthinkable for a Jew, for whom ingesting human blood was an abomination. In fact, it resonates much more neatly with the mystery cults of the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, where gods were symbolically devoured to forge a spiritual communion between the cult member and the deity. Importing such practices into Judaism would have been regarded by the mainstream as blasphemous.

Evidence has also accumulated over the last few decades that Jesus modelled his cures and exorcisms on pagan magicians’, primarily from Egypt, echoing – or perhaps confirming – early Jewish claims that he had been schooled in sorcery in Egypt. And if the suppressed ‘Gnostic Gospels’ are accepted as genuinely representing certain sides of Jesus’ beliefs and teaching – as we do – then they, too, show a thinking not obviously associated with the Judaism of his day, especially where the spirituality of the feminine is concerned, as exemplified in his relationship with Mary Magdalene.

The majority of New Testament scholars simply reject the non-Jewish parts of the gospels as inauthentic, arguing that the Eucharist was invented by the apostles of the new religion – Paul again! – to make it more Gentile-friendly, something familiar from the sects that celebrated dying-and-rising saviour gods who incarnated as a mortal man. The academics assume that this was borrowed from one of many such cults, perhaps that of Mithras or Dionysus, and was applied to the meal that Jesus’ first followers held purely in memory of him (with no mystical connotations).

But in fact, there is no reason to reject these passages except the impossibility of fitting them into a Jewish context. The logic is that, since we know that Jesus was Jewish, and no Jew could possible have entertained such practices, then he couldn’t have done so, and therefore they must be later inventions.

However, the evidence simply isn’t there. It is hard to imagine later followers inventing Jesus using pagan magic in such detail – even down to specific phrases found in earlier Greco-Egyptian magical papyri. And the internal evidence of the New Testament itself points to the Eucharist being one of the earliest Christian practices, going back to Jesus himself. It is the one element that appears virtually identically in all four gospels and Paul’s Letters. (It is generally agreed that Paul’s Letters predate the gospels, although we would argue that Mark’s Gospel might be contemporary with some of Paul’s writings.)

Even odder, as Paul clearly struggled to fit the Eucharist into his ‘revealed’ version of Jesus’ mission, evidently he would even have been happier to ignore the rite entirely, but it was already too well established. His solution was to transmute the rite into a memorial, specifically to dodge the ‘communion’ aspect. So ironically the evidence points to the exact reverse of the conventional position – instead of Paul adding the ‘mystical communion’ element, he tried to get rid of it!

Part of the Christian process of redefining the meaning of the ritual meal was linking it to the Last Supper the night before his crucifixion. However, the evidence of John’s Gospel is that Jesus actually instituted the rite earlier, when he was preaching in Galilee – which led to a mass desertion of disciples appalled by his injunction that they must drink his blood.

It must be stressed that such practices are not merely difficult to reconcile with Judaism – as a would-be Messiah had to be – but impossible. They are totally incompatible.

So, as some scholars are now beginning to argue, could the Jewish parts be the invention? But that solution doesn’t work either, since it means rejecting passages that are strongly evidential – such as the episode of the Syro-Phoenician woman and the entry into Jerusalem.

So we hit an impasse. According to accepted thinking, Jesus could never have been both a Jewish leader and a proponent of mystery school rites. Is there any possible solution?

Enter the Magus

One potential way forward, we realised – with some astonishment – lay in exploring the parallel between Jesus and that flamboyant scriptural bad boy to end bad boys, Jesus’ hugely unconventional contemporary, Simon Magus, whose very name underlines his apparently pagan credentials, ‘Magus’ meaning ‘occultist’ or ‘magician’.

The earliest reference to Simon Magus (or Simon of Gitta, after the town of his birth in Samaria) comes in the Acts of the Apostles, the continuation of Luke’s Gospel that takes the story on after Jesus’ crucifixion. After the first persecution of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem that began with the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, some of Jesus’ disciples, led by Philip, fled to Samaria. This was within, at most, ten years of the crucifixion – probably less. Here they find that many Samaritans follow Simon Magus, regarded as the ‘Great Power’ sent by God. Philip not only successfully converts Simon’s followers to Christianity, but also the Magus himself. Some time later Peter and the disciple John go to Samaria to take the Holy Spirit to the community established by Philip, and Simon Magus reveals his true colours by offering them money for the secret of the Holy Spirit, earning a stern condemnation from Peter.

Clearly, as the Simonites found it so easy to switch their allegiance there must have been a marked similarity between the messages of Jesus and the Magus. And Simon himself was, albeit briefly, once a member of the Christian community in Samaria. Although Acts attributes his success there to sorcery, as we now know Jesus himself indulged in pagan magic, so this points up a similarity between them.

Although Acts’ story ends with Simon asking forgiveness, other early Christian sources show he went on to challenge the fledgling Jesus movement, appearing in the writings of the Church Fathers as the ‘first heretic’ who attempted to lead the early Christians astray. Again, the term suggests a basic similarity between Simon and Jesus – heresy being a variation of a religion.

A major source is the related texts known as the Clementina or the Pseudo-Clementine Literature. Written around 150 CE but drawing on earlier material, it describes the struggle between Peter and Simon Magus for the hearts, minds and souls of the Samaritans.

It is crystal clear that the Church Fathers’ big problem was that Simon Magus was far, far too similar to Jesus, performing miracles and healings – even being regarded as an incarnate god. The early Christians were anxious to point out to their flock that, although Simon appeared to be cut from the same cloth as Jesus, this was a ploy by the Devil to sow confusion. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote that Simon “worked under the cloak of Christ” and even hinted that he claimed to be Jesus resurrected. Hyppolytus of Rome said bluntly: “He was not the Christ.” But do they protest too much?

The Magus, too, promoted a seemingly peculiar blend of Jewish and pagan ideas. The Clementina makes the apparently extraordinary statement that, while he taught that there were “many gods,” he was citing the books of Moses (i.e. the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament). This seemed so weird that the Clementina was dismissed as nonsense – but in 1842 a work of Hippolytus was discovered in which he had included (in order to point out the errors) large extracts from Simon’s own treatise, the ‘Great Revelation’, whose one-time existence was known but which was believed to have been lost.

The ‘Great Revelation’ reveals an elevation of the sacred feminine and an emphasis on sexual mysticism that fit awkwardly with the patriarchal character of Judaism, and which caused much outrage among the Church Fathers, to whom Simon’s rituals were obscene and disgusting. Notoriously, he is said to have travelled with one Helen, a former prostitute from Tyre – described as a black woman who danced in chains, and who he claimed was the incarnation of God’s ‘First Thought’, the female power through whom God had created the material world. (Of course there are intriguing parallels between the relationships of Simon and Helen, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene as portrayed in the Gnostic Gospels.)

An even more extraordinary link between Simon and Jesus is that, again according to the Clementina, the two men shared the same teacher: John the Baptist. Indeed, it states that it was Simon Magus, not Jesus, who John chose as his successor.

But what does all this have to tell us about the historical Jesus?

The big clue comes from the fact that Simon Magus was a Samaritan, one of those who, despite an ethnic kinship with the Jews, were detested by them – a feeling that was decidedly mutual.

On the subject of Jesus and Samaria, the gospel writers appear to differ awkwardly. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is depicted as shunning the land and its people (with some exceptions, notably the parable of the Good Samaritan). On the other hand, John’s Gospel has him extending his mission into Samaria.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that the enigmatic Gospel of John was originally written for an early Samaritan Christian community, which would explain its positive view of the Samaritans. For example, it describes the first person to whom Jesus chooses to reveal his Messiahship as the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well in the heart of Samaria, and the first to recognise him as the Messiah are Samaritans. We suggest it was written for Samaritan converts from Simon Magus’ following – after all, some of the gospel’s unique stories, particularly those with an unexpected sexual subtext, seem to have been specifically included (or contrived) to subvert Simon’s teaching.

The key figure of John the Baptist was also active in Samaria. According to John’s Gospel, one of his centres was Aenon (modern Ainûn), in Samaria.

So, Jesus and John the Baptist both took their missions into Samaria – another parallel with Simon Magus. But what is it about that land that explains the Jewish/pagan paradox of both Jesus’ and Simon’s teachings?

The key lies in the reason for the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, which had its roots in the earliest days of Israel. The Samaritans were descended from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manesseh, and still inhabited their lands, between Judea and Galilee. Originally, Ephraim was predominant: Moses’ successor and the conqueror of the Promised Land, Joshua, was from Ephraim and the tribe was given the honour of being custodians of the Ark of the Covenant in its sanctuary at Shiloh. Some historians and archaeologists believe that Ephraim and Manesseh were two of only three tribes (the other being Benjamin) that came out of Egypt, the others being native Canaanites who were converted to the religion of Moses. And intriguingly, legend linked them with the Egyptian religion of Heliopolis, since their progenitors, Ephraim and Manesseh, were sons of Joseph and Asenath, the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis.

After the creation of the kingdom of Israel a power struggle developed between the tribes of Ephraim and Judah. King David usurped Ephraim’s status by taking the Ark to Jerusalem, the new religious centre in Judah’s territory. After Solomon, the kingdom split in two, Ephraim heading the ten tribes of the larger Kingdom of Israel in the north, with the smaller Kingdom of Judah (which gave its name to the Jewish people and religion) in the south. A new sanctuary and temple, a rival to Jerusalem, was built in Ephraim’s land on Mount Gerizim.

Although larger and more powerful, the northern kingdom collapsed when it was invaded by the Assyrian empire in the eighth century BCE. The Jews later claimed that the Assyrian influence corrupted the religion of the north, a taunt that was returned when Judah underwent its own trauma of invasion and mass deportation in the Babylonian Captivity two centuries later. When the Jews returned to Jerusalem after their seventy-year exile, they set about codifying and reforming their religion, incorporating concepts from that of Babylon. So both the Jews and the Samaritans believed that only they practised the ‘pure’ religion of Moses, and that the other’s version was heretical. Victors’ history decided that the Jews won, but the Samaritans could have been right…

The rivalry reached a climax when, about two centuries before Jesus, the Jews conquered Samaria and destroyed their temple – yet another reason for Samaritan resentment. It was only with the advent of Roman rule that Samaria was freed from Jewish subjugation.

Not unnaturally, by Jesus’ day, the Jews and Samaritans detested each other. The hostility even affected their respective end times speculations: all the prophecies foresaw a re-gathering of the twelve tribes – one of the functions of the Messiah – and a reconciliation of Judah and Ephraim, but opinions differed over which tribe would come out on top. Naturally, the Jews thought it would be them. Moreover, their deeply-ingrained prejudice made the idea of bringing the Samaritans back into the fold deeply distasteful. Meanwhile, the Samaritans believed in a coming saviour, the Taheb (‘Restorer’ or ‘Returner’), who would reassemble the tribes under the authority of Ephraim, restoring the situation that had existed at the very beginning of Israelite history. And part of the Taheb’s function was to overthrow Judah. (The Samaritan woman would therefore have recognised Jesus as the Taheb.)

Many scholars and archaeologists have shown that the Israelites’ original religion was far from the monotheistic and patriarchal institution it was to become, and that it owed much to either, or both, the native, pagan religions of Canaan and Egypt. The classic study is Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess (1967, revised 1990), which argued that, before the split after Solomon’s reign, the Israelites had worshipped a goddess, Asherah, alongside Yahweh, revealing both polytheism and an awareness of the sacred feminine. (Images of cherubim excavated from ninth-century Israel are almost identical to Egyptian depictions of the winged Isis.) Patai also showed that early Israelite tradition incorporated a female figure which manifested God’s power of creation.

And as we know, all of these are characteristics of the teaching of the Samaritan Simon Magus – which makes sense if, as the Samaritans claimed, they really did preserve the original form of the Israelite religion.

But we believe it would also resolve the basic contradiction about how Jesus’ career could incorporate ‘Jewish’ and pagan elements. If, instead of ‘Jewish’ we think in terms of the ‘people of Israel’ – i.e. the original religion and tribes – then much about his mission falls into place.

The Samaritan connection also offers an explanation of the origin of the Eucharist. One of the texts that might include a possible Jewish precursor to the Christian Eucharist is the late BCE or early CE ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’. Normally described as a product of the Jewish community in Egypt, it includes a ritual involving the eating of bread and the drinking of wine – the nearest ceremony to the Eucharist in any Jewish source, and, although the key element of equating the bread and wine with body and blood is absent, some have suggested that it may have influenced either Jesus’ rite or the practices of the first Christians, who added the communion element.

However, as ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’ describes the Biblical tale of the union of the patriarch Joseph and the daughter of the Egyptian high priest of Heliopolis, it was clearly written by or for a community to which their marriage was particularly important. As the sons of Joseph and Asenath were Ephraim and Manesseh, the legendary ancestors of the Samaritans – and there was a large Samaritan community in Egypt – it seems the text is Samaritan and not Jewish.

So in the Samaritan connection we find clues to the apparent discrepancy between the Jewishness and paganism found in Jesus’ teachings. And it was against the background of age-old simmering tribal hatred that the extraordinary character of Simon Magus – the ‘bad’ Samaritan – arose, challenging the cult of Jesus with his miracles and claims of divinity.

It is all too easy to accept the rather garbled version of his later life as given by the early Church fathers, in which he is tamed by the apostles and dies in a magical battle with Saint Peter. Yet this is the man who it seems John the Baptist nominated as his official successor – and not Jesus… But that, as they say, is another story…

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Despite often bitter opposition from many vested interests, LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE have fearlessly exposed cover-ups and conspiracies, from the faking of the Shroud of Turin (Turin Shroud), the Rudolf Hess mission (Double Standards), the battle among the Second World War Allies (Friendly Fire), the British royal family (War of the Windsors), the New Age movement and the hijacking of ancient Egypt (The Stargate Conspiracy), the Priory of Sion (The Sion Revelation) – and the origins and history of Christianity (The Templar Revelation) as well as their latest book The Masks of Christ. Their website is www.picknettprince.com.

The French visionary writer Jean Parvulesco’s main agent – if not hope – for world change rests with Vladimir Putin. Parvulesco argues that – whether we are aware of it or not – we find ourselves at the crossroads of “great history,” where a totally new era is about to be born.

For such a new period to begin, the old needs to die first. For Parvulesco, this is the old “democratic system” of political correctness, which he feels has now reached its limits and is no longer supportable. It has become “a permanent and total nightmare.” Many will wonder how the “new world” is to come about. The best example of what appeared to be a sudden, almost instantaneous collapse is seen in the fall of the Soviet Union, two decades ago. It illustrates that powerful empires can, from one day to the next, completely disappear, requiring a new society and structure to be built from the ground upwards.

When news of the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared on television screens, the system had already imploded. It was just the public revelation of its death; the disintegration of the communist system had already occurred. According to Parvulesco, the collapse of “democratic Europe” has already taken place too, and we are now in the years between its collapse and the public acceptance of its demise – and the start of a new Europe.

For Parvulesco, the evidence of the collapse of this system is apparent in the recent political history of Italy and Germany, and to some extent that of France and Great Britain. But in each case he feels the same dire situation has transpired: an “immense empty desert,” the wasteland of “social democracy.” A local version of what he sees as a “worldwide conspiracy,” but one that has failed and will soon be sent back to the “black hole” from where it came.

Parvulesco knows what to write on the death certificate; but he also feels he knows what the New Europe will be: the “Eurasian Empire of the End Times.” He labels our timeframe an interregnum where what happened to Russia is actually evidence that dramatic political change is possible. The Soviet Union was the first domino to fall, with the others in Europe soon to follow.

Could he be right? In 1976, Parvulesco published “La ligne géopolitique de l’URSS et le ‘projet océanique fondamental’ de l’Amiral G.S. Gorchkov” (The geopolitical line of the USSR and the ‘fundamental oceanographic project’ of Admiral G.S. Gorchkov), which he labelled “political-revolutionary research.” In it he wrote that the Soviet Union would end up changing the course of history. And changing the course of history is, for Parvulesco, the only true goal politics should have.

Parvulesco therefore provides an interesting type of prophecy. Whereas most prophets predict the end of the world at a given time, his type of prophecy brings more detail about the type of change and how. As to its timeframe, it is very much like “when the time is right.”

So, what is meant to happen? Parvulesco argues that across Europe there are geopolitical groups at work – often clandestinely – laying the groundwork for the Eurasian agenda. Like the Project for a New American Century, there are other think tanks hard at work – and judging from the amount of newspaper headlines they don’t get, much more secretly – to bring about a new Eurasia. Despite their secrecy, Parvulesco was able to lay his hands on one article titled “The Imperial Eurasian Pact.” Similar to the idea put into action by the Neocons after 9/11 (an agenda that claimed to want to bring peace to the world by using the power of America’s military might), this group states that, “It is the confrontation of our imperial and catholic [universal] doctrines with the current political-historical reality […] which will see the final emergence of the catholic Great Empire which constitutes our ultimate objective, the Imperium Ultimum, the Regnum Sanctum, which should comport, in principle, three operational stages […].”

The first stage is the creation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, that is considered to be the axis along which this major change will occur. This axis will tie together the destiny of three nations (France, Germany and Russia).

The second stage is the integration of what was traditionally known as West and East Europe, together with Russia, Siberia, India and Japan.

The final stage involves what is termed the destruction of the “global democratic conspiracy,” led by the United States, including a revolutionary liberation of its people, after which America as a whole (North and South) will become one entity. We can only wonder whether the present drive by the US to expand NAFTA and create a North American Union are steps in this direction.

The end of the planetary superpower that is the United States is forecast to be an act of self-destruction, a continental civil war very much on par with the first Civil War. The extreme dissatisfaction within the United States, the extreme disparity between the archconservative religious community and the more liberal, means that being elected as president on a genuine agenda (rather than one of total style but no substance) is almost impossible. For Parvulesco, it will be primarily America’s Catholic, ex-European community that will lead America towards its new destiny – and cause the demise of the current “global conspiracy.” There will be a new Europe, but also a new America.

In the end change is a social process, but it often needs a symbol. Hitler became the face of World War II, Lenin – more than Marx – that of communism, etc. So who is the new face of Europe, and who is the creator of this new Eurasian Empire? For Parvulesco, that “messiah” is already here: Vladimir Putin. Even though Putin is no longer president, his influence as Russian prime minister remains virtually omnipresent.

Vladimir Putin remains the face of the New Russia, a country with a vast territory and natural resources that is able to hold Europe to ransom, energy-wise, should it ever want to.

Who is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? This is a question that many in a non-Parvulesco universe have also asked. Seen as a pawn of the KGB’s successor, in Parvulesco’s world, Putin is the direct emanation of the secret revolutionary groups of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. These, he believes, are trying to make their decades-long secret battle open and public, moving from a type of synarchic, behind the scenes government, into a more open type of rule.

Whereas some conspiracy theorists claim the CIA and various secret societies like Skull & Bones are the real puppet masters of American politics, Parvulesco says the situation in the Soviet Union was not much different. Ruled for a long time by secret powerbrokers whose agents are now stepping out into the open taking the course of Russian politics into the direction they have been trying to steer it from behind the veil for a number of decades.

Unlike in the US where the “conspiracy” is often faceless, Parvulesco lists two people as Russia’s master conspirators. One was the chief of the Soviet security service (GRU) and one time Commander in Chief of the former Warsaw Pact, General S.M. Stemenko (died 1976), the other was Marshall N.V. Ogarkov, a former head of the Soviet military. Marshall Ogarkov, who died in 1994, is rumoured to have been behind a failed coup attempt which in turn led to a kind of counter-conspiracy that brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power.

Parvulesco is convinced that if this counter-conspiracy had not succeeded, the end of the Soviet Union would have occurred several years earlier, with a transition from the Soviet Union to the New Russia that would have been much harsher. Indeed, it underlines that years before the actual demise of the Soviet Union, the regime was comatose, ready for the taking, just like – in Parvulesco’s eyes – Western Europe (and the United States of America) is now.

Parvulesco is not alone in his assessment of these two men. French intelligence expert Pierre de Villemarest who wrote the history of the GRU, labelled “the Soviet’s most secret service,” says Gen. Sergei Matveevich Stemenko was “one of the first geopoliticians of the Soviet Union, perhaps even the first.” Though de Villemarest calls Stemenko a Soviet, he considered himself to be truly a “Great Russian.” “For this caste,“ writes de Villemarest, “the Soviet Union was an Empire that was called to dominate the Eurasian continent, not only from the Ural to Brest, but also from the Ural to Mongolia, from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.”

The “dream” of Russia à la Stemenko may be seen as merely returning back to the days when Russia was a true empire, before the days of the Bolshevic Revolution. But for Parvulesco, that in itself is part of a larger, and most intriguing puzzle – a mission.

PHILIP COPPENS was an author and investigative journalist, ranging from the world of politics to ancient history and mystery. He was editor-in-chief of the Dutch magazine Frontier and a frequent contributor to various magazines. Website www.philipcoppens.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).

Vladimir Putin was the subject of an article in the Sept-Oct 2001 issue of New Dawn that prophetically discussed the symbolic significance of his ascension to power and the important role he was destined to play in the future of not only Russia, but the world.

Help us to keep the information flowing now 10 years along. We are a volunteer supported public donation funded organisation. There are no government grants around here.

“Stupidity is not hereditary it is something you acquire yourself”Super Steal

The proposed changes to superannuation have received the usual round of economic discussions and justifications by the masters of spin, leaving the unsuspecting public thinking that these changes will affect only ‘the Rich’ – some 16,000 people or .04 per cent of the nation’s 4.1 million retirees.

There is no mention that the acceptance by the public, of these changes, will set a precedent for a government, in power at any given time, to ‘legally steal’ directly from the people.

Superannuation is a person’s future. It is needed for a time when one no longer earns a living, but lives on what was earned and saved for retirement. Having someone put their hand into your savings or your superannuation is tantamount to theft

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The history of political reforms contains many instances of preliminary policies being effected to provide a base for a reform. The base policy refers to only to a selected minority, in this case the .04 per cent of retirees classified as ‘the Rich’ and does not intimidate the majority of voters.

What the voters don’t realise is that they have endorsed and accepted this reform policy. Even though it applies only above a specific numeric value at that time, the underlying principle applies to anyone. Acceptance is further entrenched with no serious complaints over the passage of a little time, and after some further adjustments that expand the reach of the policy, the full reform is put into effect. This is the process of “Gradualism” and has been used very effectively since the Whitlam government.

Today he comes for the ‘Rich’. Tomorrow he comes for everyone

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It should be noted that gradualistic change does not always occur with the same Party in power. Due to the time needed for full acceptance, a policy that one Party implements has, in the past, either been completed or maintained and extended by the other Party.

Given such circumstances, Party politics is as non-democratic as it is unconstitutional.

Concerned about Your Super – you have the power to do something about it.

Then may be you will treat this threat the same way as your concern to rectifying that politicians and publoc servants you have left unchecked now the masters running your country.

5th April 2013-Anzac Day reminds us of the part our wild horses played in WWI and pioneering this country pulling Cobb& Co coaches to land cultivation and construction. Noeline Franklin covers these in this report along with their major contribution as mega fauna to the health of the environment now targeted to dog food by radical greens fiction they are destroying public land. Listen [HERE]

Visit the podcast library at our home site containing all our broadcasts, Click the button

HENDRA & BAT VIRUSES

For thousands of years people have anecdotally had cause for concern that bats carry diseases or sickness. A bite from a bat or a rat might mean death or illness. With the advent of medicine, veterinary science over the last 100 or so years we have teased apart myth information from what is mostly going on. What professionals in the medical and veterinary fields do not want the public to know is that experiments are still going on into the unknown.

Hendra virus has recently come to the attention of people where the transfer of the virus has occurred, they think so far, from bat to horse to people, bat to people possibly bat to dog to people, bat to other species and if it has led to the death of a possum out in the bush no one yet knows that’s been going on for thousands of years.

Vaccination is about the only way to deal with viral infections other than screen, cull and quarantine hoping to restrict spread of the virus like small pox dying out. Development of a vaccine is expensive and across a small animal population such as horses recovery of developmental costs is expensive per horse. The horse owner is expected to foot the bill for a vaccine program (s)he had no consultation about. People love their horses and are assumed to have bottomless pockets to keep them to the standards non horse owners expect. The bat lovers in the environmental movement of our governments made the call the horse owners pay the cost, not relocation of fig trees where bats proliferate and defecate to the point of enhancing contract with people and their domestic animals.

Bat lovers within government ranks have made the judgement call Australian people are guest of the bats and the fig trees the farmers and city planners planted not anticipating the proliferation of bats that shed viruses because their immune system is prone to the carrier state where viruses are harboured by bats and shed by bats otherwise apparently healthy. The immune system of other mammals deals with some bat viruses differently or not at all. As the medical and veterinary professions get to know bats no one can remove from their environment around their houses and domestic animals because of preservation orders placed on them (the bats and fig trees) from people way off in Canberra or Brisbane horse, dog, guinea pig owners are part of the big experiment paying for vaccines developed on their behalf without their consultation for $300+ per horse for ID, vet attendance, scanning, screening, quarantining, monitoring extorted for wanting to attend local agricultural shows including the EKKA.

Now boffins in export nations have concerns if they want to buy Australian horses they want to exclude diseases and bat viruses from their country and cannot tell the difference between a horse exposed to the virus is in a carrier sub clinical state or is part of a vaccination program or both. Horse owners and vets are in the early days of understanding Hendra and who knows how many other versions of the virus or other viruses bats carry across Australia.

There are about 79 species of bats in Australia and some have significant mobility and distribution. These distributions might change as people plant more fig trees on their farms. Life stylers encourage back the rainforest in their farms and suburbs irrespective of whether rainforest was there in the last 40 million years or never there previously. Then there are our globe trotting bureaucrats and boffins how many viruses are they translocating internationally for our bats to acquire and translocate and modify to achieve cross species infection in Australia. We need cough free airport lounges. Ban air conditioning, recycling virus aerosols in aeroplanes and public buildings, high rise offices.

The Hendra vaccination program has been another bureaucrat and boffin driven problem solving approach using horse owners to fund their experiments where relocating bats and fig trees to reduce exposure has been blindly dismissed as a cost effective option entirely or as part of this program to address bat virus transfer.

Can every horse owner in Australia be expected to foot the bill when we have a very anti horse bureaucracy in government departments insular and very prone to tunnel vision in problem solving to a formula. If horse owners vaccinate against Hendra and exclude any EKKA winners from export as breeding stock or performance horses in the Olympics or semen ova or embryos excluded from international trade, then what about the other battery of viruses bats carry. Will this generate future funding streams to deal with virus 78HY, ZWQ, WHYS, IQDOT……… and the list goes on because we are being politically correct. Bats and fig trees have been in Australia for 55M years for bats and about 85M years or less for fig trees. People have been in Australia for about 60000 years, dogs 3500 years, horses 200 years and before environmentalism spread like a virus through universities over the last 100 years, vaccination became routine for less than 50 years.

If you buy a tetanus vaccine for a sheep or cow, it costs 36 cents a shot X2 vaccinations and for horses might cost $40 each course with full veterinary attendance might go to $100 for the kids pony. Now if you want to prepare your horse to attend the EKKA as a stud horse breeder then there is selection, breeding stallion mare raised for several years, then raise the progeny to 1,2,3,5,10 years feed vaccination housing training so people can pay the EKKA society to come and see your horse that might be worth $50000+ in wages time and feed to show condition. You the horse owner might be lucky to achieve a photo opportunity and a $10 ribbon for your trouble and $70 entry fee per class. Basically the medical and veterinary professions and Australian government bureaucracy has used the concerns over Hendra Virus to close down livestock production and ownership and the Brisbane EKKA.

It is clear injecting our footballers with horse anabolic steroids amino acids and experimenting with our children is far more viable than conducting an agricultural show maintaining rare breeds of megafauna rendered uneconomical, unviable and unaffordable for even the richest people in Australia, busy paying taxes which then are diverted to wages for bureaucrats rather than programs of national good such as community health and safety, biosecurity of community and their domestic animals, strategic astute management of native species. Back to bust the farmer the horse owner user pays once, twice, 3 times or more. Rates on the farm, income tax, carbon tax on the fuel and electricity, GST, DPI, HECS on the veterinary medical education……. Town planner telling us if our stables are up to standard, fire proof, water proof, animal rights proof.

The question remains why do horse owners in Queensland and Northern NSW have to pay fully for the Hendra virus vaccination experiment when all other options of dealing with the dilemma have been excluded by unaffected people on our behalf. Why use the EKKA to justify the program shoehorning people into the experiment? Who is going to convince our export customers for example that this expensive vaccination program is not going to mask the carrier state for Hendra or other bat viruses not yet identified. This could turn into an industry if there are any horses survive the purge of horse raising in Australia from Brumby massacres inland to only the Billionares on the coast able to raise horses near a bat fig. Don’t worry about giving a ribbon out to the EKKA line up of horses in future, post out the ribbon to the only horse owner left standing after all these regulations and extortion rackets are taken to their full conclusion. Put a picture of the last horse on the internet with an IUCN rating as extinct.

EKKA has had its centenary and can now entre the history books with circuses and what people used to do before they gave up ‘exploiting animals.’ Consigning them to oblivion of the antisocial vegan world. Soon the Australians that used to remember the excitement of the circus coming to town, the EKKA, cracker night will all be dead. Killed by the politically correct boffins and bureaucrats. Pallid vegan press button kids will be the new look Australia not game to venture out side because of the crocodiles, bats, dingo, fig trees have been given voting rights. Horses, mastodon, mammoth, giant wombats are just things you might stumble across on the internet.

Are there bats in the belfry or the bunker? Will only vaccinated spectators be allowed into the EKKA to protect our horses from potentially little known about viruses brought in on the clothing, feet and body fluids of international and interstate travellers. Who are the bats in parliament and government departments?

Queensland horse owners want all visitors to the EKKA to be self contained and vaccinated so they do not pose a risk to their horses. Considered highest risk are boffins and bureaucrats frequent international travellers and bushwalkers in rainforest wilderness areas self confessed politically correct people of vegan tendencies putting bats rights ahead of horses or people. Australia has not gone mad it just appears that way some days.

For the last two years of the EKKA in Brisbane bat classes will replace horses. Riders are having difficulty training bats to use the show jumping arena.

RESERVE BANK TO INVEST IN CHINA

RESERVE BANK OF AUSTRALIA TO INVEST 5% OF ITS MONEY WITH THE PERPETRATORS OF ORGAN HARVESTING AND THE ONE CHILD POLICY

Australia’s central bank is gearing up to invest a slice of its foreign currency reserves in Chinese government bonds.

Speaking in Shanghai, RBA deputy Governor Philip Lowe said the bank has sought and received approval to hold about 5 per cent of its $38 billion foreign currency assets in China.

2 wonderful videos included at the link.

Please watch it.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama joked Saturday about his plans for a radical second-term evolution from “strapping young Muslim Socialist” to retiree golfer, all with a new hairstyle like first lady Michelle’s.

Obama used this year’s annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner to poke fun at himself and some of his political adversaries, asking if it was still possible to be brought down a peg after 4½ years as commander-in-chief.

Entering to the rap track “All I Do Is Win” by DJ Khaled, Obama joked about how re-election would allow him to unleash a radical agenda. But then he showed a picture of himself golfing on a mock magazine cover of “Senior Leisure.”

“I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be,” the president remarked, and then recounted his recent 2-for-22 basketball shooting performance at the White House Easter Egg hunt.

But Obama’s most dramatic shift for the next four years appeared to be aesthetic. He presented a montage of shots featuring him with bangs similar to those sometimes sported by his wife.

Obama closed by noting the nation’s recent tragedies in Massachusetts and Texas, praising Americans of all stripes from first responders to local journalists for serving the public good.

Saturday night’s banquet not far from the White House attracted the usual assortment of stars from Hollywood and beyond. Actors Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Claire Danes, who play government characters on series, were among the attendees, as was Korean entertainer Psy. Several Cabinet members, governors and members of Congress were present.

And despite coming at a somber time, nearly two weeks after the deadly Boston Marathon bombing and 10 days after a devastating fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, the president and political allies and rivals alike took the opportunity to enjoy some humor. Late-night talk-show host Conan O’Brien headlined the event.

Some of Obama’s jokes came at his Republican rivals’ expense. He asked that the GOP’s minority outreach begin with him as a “trial run” and said he’d take his recent charm offensive with Republicans on the road, including to a book-burning event with Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson would have had better success getting Obama out of office if he simply offered the president $100 million to drop out of last year’s race, Obama quipped.

And on the 2016 election, the president noted in self-referential irony that potential Republican candidate Sen. Marco Rubio wasn’t qualified because he hasn’t even served a full term in the Senate. Obama served less than four years of his six-year Senate term before he was elected president in 2008.

Your Freedom of Speech being closed by Australian parliament is revealed in the above video by this great Australian video producer “TOPHER” plus “Counting The Cost of Government” below are both … compulsive viewing

LATEST NEWS STORIES at SOS-NEWSFRONT BLOG

SOS-NEWSFRONTis our front line news service blog along with archive info 2010 back to 2006

The Forbidden History of Terrible Taxes

We as Australians never suffered “FOOL”, yet we elect them into our Parliament without consideration under some false loyalty that once held credence to political parties with values delivering governance for the people of this nation. That no longer exists which recent history reflects both major parties personal greed and party power hunger being the creed for today’s governance as they are handed unaccountable license to destroy this great nation.

This 2 minute audio explains the position of Australia, it’s parliament, with reference to how this all happened. Vocal harmony by “Skyclad” – narration by Mark Webb.

To listen click the play button above – to download the mp3 file right click [here]

“We do not approve of political jokes – we have seen too many of them ELECTED”

Gillard has been rated as the 4th best Prime Minister ever:

Of the 27 Prime Ministers of Australia – Menzies and 5 others tied for first; 11 Prime Ministers tied for second; 10 tied for third; and Gillard came in fourth.

What Mains Stream Media Refuse to Publish

LATEST BROADCASTS

5th April 2013– Mal Davies introduces an interview with Prime Minister Gillard by 2GB presenter Ben Fordham. This is riveting as the PM dodges hard questions Ben fired which all Australian need answers for. With that hide of an elephant, she dodged and weaved issues like a true politician backed into a wall of undeniable truth. SEcond, listen to this as proposal for farmers to be jailed over working dog projected violation by a well chosen few experts funded to get results, not to help save our rural families on struggle street under government unworkable legislation and enforcers dedicated to shut down our shrinking food bowl.

24th March 2013– Mal Davies speaks to People’s Activist and self employed engineer Wayne Glew, who explains of government manipulating our constitution, the Australia Act, and illegal local government and explains his court action challenging the Attorney Generals Office authority and courts in Western Australia.

11th March 2013– Mal Davies informs Cairns resident of Lord Monkton’s meeting 15 March – Rosella closes after 100 years, Cowra Beetroot Cannery closes now we do not have a cannery anywhere in Australia – Who owns the insurance companies that are flooding Australia.

David E. Sanger — New York Times April 17, 2013

A panel of former senior American officials and outside experts, including several who recently left the Obama administration, issued a surprisingly critical assessment of American diplomacy toward Iran on Wednesday, urging President Obama to become far more engaged and to reconsider the likelihood that harsh sanctions will drive Tehran to concessions.

In a report issued by the Iran Project, the former diplomats and experts suggested that the sanctions policy, rather than bolstering diplomacy, may be backfiring. As the pressure has increased, the group concluded, sanctions have “contributed to an increase in repression and corruption within Iran” and “may be sowing the seeds of long-term alienation between the Iranian people and the United States.”

The critique comes as both Israel and Congress are urging the administration to go in the opposite direction, to put a sharp time limit on negotiations and, if necessary, to go beyond the financial and oil sanctions that have caused a tremendous drop in the value of the Iranian currency and sent inflation soaring.

“I fundamentally believe that the balance between sanctions and diplomacy has been misaligned,” said Thomas R. Pickering, who was one of the State Department’s highest-ranking career diplomats and whom the department has called on to head up important investigations, including one into the death last fall of the American ambassador to Libya.

In an interview, Mr. Pickering also contended that Mr. Obama should review the covert program against Iran — which has included computer sabotage of its nuclear facilities — to “stop anything that is peripheral, that is not buying us much time” in slowing Iran’s progress. The report itself, however, says nothing about the sabotage effort, which has been a major element of the American strategy.

Mr. Pickering, who is such a towering figure in the State Department that a major program to train young diplomats is named for him, is not the only prominent signatory of the report. Others include Lee H. Hamilton, who was a leader of the commission on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and serves on Mr. Obama’s intelligence advisory board; Anne-Marie Slaughter, the director of policy planning during Mr. Obama’s first term; and Ryan C. Crocker, who served in many prominent ambassadorial positions. Former Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, an early mentor to Mr. Obama in the Senate, was among the Republican signatories.

At the core of the difference in strategy are these questions: Are the increasing sanctions likely to harden Iran’s position and convince its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that the president’s real goal is overthrowing the current government? Or are they likely to convince the Iranians, eventually, that the price of continuing the country’s nuclear program is simply too high, as Mr. Obama has argued?

So far, there is plenty of evidence that the sanctions are hurting Iran, but none that they are changing the course of the country’s nuclear program. Still, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted this week to bolster sanctions, if necessary, and Israel has argued that the stalling of the most recent round of talks has offered only more proof that the Iranians are playing for time, seeking to expand their nuclear enrichment capacity while keeping the talks limping along.

Mr. Obama and his diplomats have insisted that the sanctions they have imposed are in support of diplomacy. A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said in a statement that the administration was sticking with its approach.

“We just completed a series of diplomatic talks” with America’s allies in dealing with Tehran, Ms. Psaki said, “including three recent rounds of meetings that included Iran.” She said that “a dual track approach of rigorous sanctions and serious negotiations is the right approach. However, the onus is on Iran to take the next steps and move the process forward.”